From where I stop out on the shoulder for a look, nothing yet seems inspired or up to parade pitch. Several tissue-paper floats are not yet manned or hitched up. The centerpiece Haddam High band has not appeared. And marshals in hot swallowtail coats and tricorne hats are hiking around with walkie-talkies and clipboards, conferring with parade captains and gazing at their watches. All in fact seems timeless and desultory, most of the participants standing alone in the sun in their costumes, looking off much as the fantasy ballplayers did in Cooperstown yesterday, and much, I’m sure, for the same reasons: they’re bored, or else full of longing for something they can’t quite name.
I decide to make a fast swerve through the lot entrance, avoid the whole parade assemblage and continue back out onto 27 toward town, satisfied that I’ve glimpsed behind the parade’s façade and not been the least disappointed. Even the smallest public rigmarole is a pain in the ass, its true importance measurable not in the final effect but by how willing we are to leave our usual selves behind and by how much colossal bullshit and anarchy we’re willing to put up with in a worthwhile cause. I always like it better when clowns seem to try to be happy.
Unexpectedly, though, just as I make my turn around and through the Shop Rite entrance, bent on escape, a man — one of the swallowtail marshals in a hat, red sash and high-buttoned shoes, who’s been consulting a clipboard while talking to one of the young men wearing diapers — starts hurriedly toward my moving car. He waves his clipboard as if he knows me and has an aim, means to share a holiday greeting or message, perhaps even get me in on the fun as someone’s substitute. (He may have noticed my LICK BUSH sticker and thinks I’m in the mood for high jinks.) Only I’m in another mood, perfectly good but one I’m happy to keep to myself, and so continue swerving without acknowledging him, right back onto 27. There’s no telling, after all, who he might be: someone with a lengthy realty complaint, or possibly Mr. Fred Koeppel of Griggstown, who “needs” to discuss a negotiated commission on his house, which’ll sell itself anyway (so let it). Or possibly (and this happens with too great a frequency) he’s somebody from my former married days who happened to be in the Yale Club just yesterday morning and saw Ann and wants to report she looks “great,” “super,” “dynamite”—one of those. But I’m not interested. Independence Day, at least for the daylight hours, confers upon us the opportunity to act as independently as we know how. And my determination, this day, is to stay free of suspicious greetings.
I drive back in on sunny and fast-emptying Seminary, where the actual civic razzmatazz still seems a good hour off — past the closed PO, the closed Frenchy’s Gulf, the nearly empty August Inn, the Coffee Spot, around the Square, past the Press Box Bar, the closed Lauren-Schwindell office, Garden State S&L, the somnolent Institute itself and the always officially open but actually profoundly closed First Presbyterian, where the WELCOME sign out front says, Happy Birthday, America! * 5K Race * HE Can Help You At The Finish Line!
Though farther on and across from Village Hall on Haddam Green there is action, with plenty of citizens already arrived in musing good spirits. A red-and-white-striped carnival marquee has been put up in the open middle sward, with our newly refurbished Victorian bandstand shining whitely in the elms and beeches and crawling with kids. Many Haddamites are simply out here strolling around as they might on some lane in County Antrim, though wearing frilly pastel dresses, seersuckers, white bucks, boaters and pink parasols, and looking — many of them — like self-conscious extras in a Fifties movie about the South. Out-of-place country-yokel music is blaring from a little glass-sided trailer owned by the station where I read Doctor Zhivago to the blind, and the police and fire departments have their free exhibits of flameproof suits, bomb-defusing shields and sniper rifles set up side by side under the big tent. The CYO has just begun its continuous volleyball game, the hospital its free blood pressure testing, the Lions and AA their joint free-coffee canteen, while the Young Democrats and Young Republicans are in the process of hosing down a mudhole for their annual tug-of-war. Otherwise, various village businesses, with their employees turned out in white aprons and red bow ties, have joined forces behind long slug-bucket grills to hawk meatless leanburgers, while some costumed Pennsylvania Dutch dancers perform folk didoes on a portable dance floor to music only they can hear. Later on, a dog show is planned.
Off to the left, across from the lawn of Village Hall, where seven years ago I achieved the profound and unwelcome independence of divorce, my silver “Firecracker Weenie Firecracker” cart sits in the warm witch hazel shade, attracting a small, dedicated crowd including Uncle Sam and two other Clio Street bombers, a few of my neighbors, plus Ed McSweeny in a business suit and a briefcase and Shax Murphy wearing a pair of pink go-to-hell pants, a bright-green blazer and running shoes — and looking, despite his Harvard background, like nothing so much as a realtor. Wardell and Everick’s gleaming onyx faces are visible back inside the trailer under the awning. Dressed in silly waiters’ tunics and paper caps, they are dispensing free Polish dogs and waxed-paper root beer mugs and occasionally rattling the “Clair Devane Fund” canisters Vonda has made up in our office. I have tried now on three occasions to sound out the two of them about Clair, whom they adored and treated like a rambunctious niece. But they have avoided me each time. And I’ve realized, as a consequence, that what I probably wanted was not to hear words about Clair at all but to hear something life-affirming and flattering about myself, and they are merely wise to me and have chosen not to let me get started. (Though it’s also possible that they’ve been stung to silence now by the two days when they were held by the police, treated harshly and then released without comment or ceremony — deemed, after all and as they are, entirely innocent.)
And yet, all is as I’ve expected and modestly planned it: no great shakes, but no small shakes either — a fine achievement for a day such at this, following a day such as that.
I pull unnoticed to the curb on the east edge of the Green, just at Cromwell Lane, let down my window to the music and crowd hum and heat, and simply sit and watch: millers and strollers, oldsters and lovers, singles and families with kids, everyone out for a morning’s smiley look-see, then an amble up Seminary for the parade, before hearkening to the day’s remains with a practical eye. There is the easeful feeling that the 4th is a day one can leave to chance; though as the hours slide toward dark it will still seem best to find oneself at home. Possibly it’s too close to Flag Day, which itself is too close to Memorial Day, which is already too damn close to Father’s Day. Too much even well-motivated celebration can pose problems.
I of course think of Paul, cased in gauze and bandages in not-so-faraway Connecticut, who would find something funny to say at the day’s innocent expense: “You know you’re an American when you …” (get socked in the eye). “They laughed at me in America when I …” (barked like a Pomeranian). “Americans never, or almost never …” (see their fathers every day).